I took some notes before the panel, of all of the things that I wanted to say – but of course in these situations you never really get to say everything you want to, so I thought it might be useful to share them.

TEAM

Diversity – leadership, sales, tech, project management. You very rarely get these in one person.

Note on resources: “No worries”, I hear you say, “We’re an Internet based business operating from New Zealand, the Internet brings us everywhere so that we don’t need to be there physically ourselves.” If only. Unfortunately, each geographic market has its own cultural, legal, and physical peculiarities, and there’s no substitute for actually being there to establish yourself. Sure, there are pure plays like github or noip to which geography is completely irrelevant, but these are few and far between.

Other notes:

On the panel, Masha said that NZ is a useful test market, in that our demographics are similar to the rest of the developed world. I’d argue that these similarities are usually very superficial. The killer difference between NZ and the rest of the world is the structure of our market. There’s one degree of separation in NZ, and practically everyone knows or has easy access to everyone else. The rest of the world does not operate like that – distribution is critical. As a global startup, every week you spend chasing the New Zealand market is a week spent learning the wrong lessons. To extend Steve Blank, don’t only get out of the building, get out of the country!

Finally, the number 8 wire mentality is killing us. Sure, we’re great all-rounder generalists, very flexible, and very resourceful. This is great for building a prototype, but suboptimal for building a scalable business that can compete on the world stage. By all means build your minimum viable product out of number 8 wire, but plan out which bits need to be shored up to be industrial strength as you scale. And rather than relying on cousin Trev who has a passing acquaintance with a specialist aspect of your business, do bring in some people who have deep experience, rather than relying on mates and mates-of-mates to see you through.